No Smoking – American Cancer Society’s Great American Smoke Out (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bill White recently posted on tobacco use in recovery. He’s been way ahead of the field on this and challenges not only treatment providers, but recovering people as well:

People in recovery are dying from smoking-related diseases in large numbers, but they are also dying from conceptual blindness: the failure to see the contradiction between claiming recovery status in the presence of continued addiction to nicotine. Too many recoveries and too many lives are going up in smoke.

Then, when I was nine months sober, I met an older woman who’d been sober, it seemed, forever. She and I were at dinner with a few other sober friends after a meeting and I did what was routine behavior at that point: I went outside several times throughout the meal to smoke. And one of the times that I returned, this woman started, in the most direct and yet gentle way imaginable, confronting me about the fact that I smoked. People had of course brought the topic up with me before but there was something different about her approach. She said things that made a lot of sense—things like that every time I inhaled on a cigarette, I was telling myself that I hated myself and that getting sober but not quitting smoking was like switching seats on the Titanic. “Honey,” I recall her saying as she leaned forward on the table, “You’re putting a smoke screen between you and your Higher Power.” It was just the kind of thing that I would have mocked before sobriety but which made a lot of sense to who I was becoming. At the end of dinner, she offered to meet me at a Nicotine Anonymous meeting the following evening.